The Recording
The Panelists
- Kevin Feasel
- Mike Chrestensen
- Mala Mahadevan
Notes: Questions and Topics
READPAST Hint
Mala ran into the READPAST hint in the wild and wanted to know more about it, so that was our first topic of the evening. We walked through an article which provides a good description of what the hint does, although I did point out that it doesn’t always work. The best use for READPAST is in things like queueing systems, where you can safely ignore the locked items and pick up an unlocked item.
Row-Level Security Attacks
The next article we looked at was a good article on row-level security attacks. For the most part, this boiled down to attacks around row-level security rather than through row-level security, although there was an interesting side channel attack involving division by 0.
SQL Server 2022 Utilization
We got a question in chat about whether SQL Server 2022 is worth learning, as many companies haven’t moved to it. It’s a fair question, but my short answer is yes, it can make sense to learn about SQL Server 2022 even if your company is using 2016. There are a couple of reasons. First, SQL Server’s database engine doesn’t tend radically to change between versions, so it’s pretty easy to get up to speed on multiple versions of SQL Server. Second, you might find something useful in SQL Server 2022 which isn’t available in prior versions, and that could drive a change.